ABSTRACT
The present chapter examines the memory of the struggle through the current representations of Amílcar Cabral. The fact that he was the main architect of the PAIGC, the great strategist and the face of the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism make him the “father and founder of the nation”, expressions used to characterise Cabral both in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Particular attention will be given to the unrealised plan for a large cultural centre dedicated to Amílcar Cabral and designed by the Brazilian architect Óscar Niemeyer, and then to the building of the Amílcar Cabral Memorial, inaugurated in 2000, in the city of Praia and funded by China. Firstly, we will seek to understand how the memorial could be put in interaction with monuments from the colonial period still standing in the nation's capital. Then we will attempt to identify the ways in which Cabral is subject to different appropriations by different communities, political elites and protest movements, signalling the symbolic, ideological and affective asymmetries at play in the co-production of the public memory of the struggle and mobilising and re-signifying Cabral's image.
